Keep the good news coming

I saw this yesterday, and I wanted to blog yesterday was not feeling well.

I always love covering good news, even if the sentencing may not make the best sense for the crime, but the fact that the suspects will be off the streets is the most important.

The article starts out:

Two former executives of a call-tracking and analytics company pleaded guilty to concealing a years-long tech support fraud scheme that victimized individuals worldwide.

Former CEO Adam Young (from Miami, Florida) and former CSO Harrison Gevirtz (from Las Vegas, Nevada) admitted to a misprision of a felony charge, which carries a maximum penalty of three years in federal prison, a fine of up to $250,000, or both, and are scheduled for sentencing on June 16.

According to court documents, they operated the C.A. Cloud Attribution, Ltd. business (using the C.A. Cloud tradename) between early 2017 and April 2022, providing telephone numbers, call recordings, call forwarding, and call-tracking services to many customers they knew were also engaged in telemarketing and tech support fraud scams.

The article continues:

The fraudsters behind these schemes placed deceptive pop-up ads on users’ computers, falsely claiming the systems were infected with malware, and directing victims to call center agents who asked for hundreds of dollars for fictitious technical services, while impersonating Microsoft and Apple in some cases.

The thing of it is, this is something that has been going on for many many many many years. This is not something that is four or five years.

We continue:

Some scammers also allegedly remotely accessed their victims’ computers and, in some instances, stole personal and financial information to withdraw funds without authorization.

Now this … may be new as part of the scheme, but probably wouldn’t surprise me. On a future podcast, we’re going to talk about what’s happened in this type of industry known as the security industry in the last 30 plus years. It would not surprise me if it turned in to a long show either.

While Young and Gevirtz knew some of their customers were involved in fraud schemes, they did not report it to law enforcement authorities. Instead, the prosecutors alleged that the two defendants advised customers to use large pools of rotating telephone numbers to reduce complaints and prevent account terminations.

This is where I would be different as company owners go. People have the right to run their companies the way they want, that’s why they’re the owner. But if I were running something like this, and complaints came in, out the employees go. Since I wouldn’t be monitoring anything because that would take time away from my other duties, I’d expect my employees to be doing things right. If the whole thing turned out to be a problem, I’d close the whole thing down. That’s just me though.

Skipping some, the article says:

Young and Gevirtz also owned and operated a call center in Tunisia from 2016 through April 2022, where some of their employees engaged in tech support fraud, which involved fraudulently accessing victims’ computers via compromised links, posing as an official technical support service, and sending false invoices.

Great! Sending false invoices on top of everything else you supposedly were doing.

Finally,

According to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, Americans lost at least $2.1 billion to tech support fraud last year based on data collected from nearly 48,000 complaints received by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2025.

No wonder I don’t answer the phone these days. They can try and scam me all they want, but I don’t answer the phone … even though I really should. But scammers won’t stop, whether it is phone or email communication.

Former US execs plead guilty to aiding tech support scammers is the article title for this one. Have fun.